All of a Piece, but Different

Over the last 30 years, John M. Miller’s paintings of angled bars arranged in interlocking rows and columns have been described in many ways--from riveting, bracing and magisterial to busy, dizzying and repetitious. As is always the case with works of art--and particularly urgent with great ones--what is genius to one viewer is boring to another.

Either way, no one has had any reason to think of Miller’s excruciatingly rigorous paintings as having a sense of humor. Until now. At Patricia Faure Gallery, the L.A. artist makes a joke of the joke his detractors often make about his work: that he has repeatedly been making the same painting since the early 1970s.

Of course he hasn’t; but, by saying that he has, they assert that the differences among various pieces--in size, scale, tint, rhythm and impact--don’t matter. As if to answer this criticism, Miller has produced “Edit,” a series of 26 small, nearly square canvases that are virtually identical.

Hung at eye level around the four walls of the main gallery, these compact masterpieces form a singular installation that clarifies the purpose of Miller’s lifelong project. “Edit” demonstrates that it doesn’t matter if two (or even 26) paintings are indistinguishable. What counts is a viewer’s experience of any one of them.

If you really pay attention to the texture of your perceptions, you know that you can never have the same one twice. The only way for someone to think that they’re seeing the same thing again and again is to ignore the details of each experience, smoothing over inconsistencies and lumping the sum into a general category.

The trick, for an artist like Miller, is to raise a viewer’s alertness to such a high level that you can’t help but notice how different one moment is from the next. His installation does this admirably, providing an occasion for exhilaration and serenity to commingle.

There’s no end to the fascinating phenomena that transpire between your eyes and your mind when you try to apprehend even one of Miller’s little paintings. From across the gallery, the pairs of short bars, which alternate with single long ones, appear to be out of focus. Although they are all solid black, aureoles in red and blue hues sometimes appear at their ends. This fuzziness and coloration have nothing to do with the size of the bars (they are big enough to be seen clearly). It is a result of the visual energy Miller’s tightly structured panels unleash.

The longer you look, the more surprises you see. If you don’t guide your eye forcefully, but just let it drift, it scans back and forth over five or six canvases, much like an animal surveying the plain for predators or prey. The closer you move toward a wall, the shorter this motion becomes.

At about four feet, when one painting fills your visual field, your eye stops scanning and begins circling counterclockwise. Eventually, it slows, stops and reverses direction. Finally, it comes to a rest. When this happens, Miller’s sharply angled bars are perfectly still and crystal clear.

Think of his exhibition as a Zen garden for art lovers. Inviting an intensity of focus that expands through time, the paintings make return visits worthwhile--just like the first time, only different.

Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through Oct. 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

***

At Close Quarters: Nancy Rubins’ first solo show in Southern California since 1994 picks up where her last one left off: transforming scrap metal scavenged from small aircraft junkyards into towering sculptures filled with so much internal energy they seem to be on the verge of bursting, like a car’s overheated radiator.

Seven years ago in San Diego, a monstrous, 3-D collage by Rubins broke through the windows of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s downtown venue. Spilling into the street, it suggested that the building had suffered the architectural equivalent of a hernia or ruptured appendix. In contrast, her new work at Gagosian Gallery is completely contained by the Richard Meier-designed space.

Titled “Chas’ Stainless Steel, Mark Thompson’s Airplane Parts, About 1,000 Pounds of Steel Wire, and Gagosian’s Beverly Hills Space,” Rubins’ cobbled-together cluster of worn stabilizers, dented manifolds, faded nosecones and neatly sliced sections of fuselage nearly fills the blocky, two-story space. In its center, a single steel support rises from the floor, branching out to form a giant (if somewhat distended) letter Y. Painted and unpainted components sprawl outward and upward from this armature, lashed to one another by thousands of feet of shiny steel wire. These taut guy lines highlight the carefully planned and cleverly improvised labor required to secure the unwieldy pieces of lightweight detritus.

From the moment you enter the gallery, you’re in the shadow of Rubins’ sculpture. Unable to get far enough away to take in a view of the whole, you find yourself backing into walls. The claustrophobia is intended, part of the punch packed by the aggressive piece and one of the strongest responses it generates.

After a while, however, you get used to your constricted quarters. When this happens, the scale of the installation shrinks. No longer daunting or intimidating, Rubins’ sculpture begins to look tasteful and restrained, more like an awkwardly arranged bouquet of industrial-strength flowers than a whirling dervish made of recycled junk.

Essential to her art is the capacity to create a vortex of energy that sucks you in, swirls you around and spits you out somewhere else--at once shaken, stirred and stunned. Like a straitjacket, the gallery’s architecture prevents this from happening. Rubins’ monument to chaos, which was constructed on a gravel lot in Topanga Canyon and reassembled indoors, needs the wide open spaces of the outdoors for its rambunctiousness to be fully felt.

Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through Oct. 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

***

Flowing River: Tony Berlant’s abstract landscapes take viewers on trips that ripple with visual energy. Yet there’s nothing dizzying about his eight new mural-scale works at L.A. Louver Gallery. So fluid is their fusion of form and content that they make you feel as if terra firma had melted like an ice cream cone on a hot summer’s day, forming a cosmic river whose pulsating current flows through the sky, across the desert, into the forest and deep underground.

Measuring 4-by-18-feet, “Painted Desert” opens the show with a bang. This dazzling panorama depicts dozens of crimson, golden and lavender canyons, all of which recede into deep space below a thin stripe of sky that is itself a rainbow of blues, grays and purples. About two-thirds of the way across Berlant’s densely detailed painting appears the life-size silhouette of a figure, who, like each viewer, gazes into the image.

In terms of materials, the figure’s head is a hole in the work’s surface. It is the only part of the panel Berlant has not covered with his trademark material: found and fabricated sheets of metal, on which crisp and blurry images have been printed.

The lush colors and resplendent textures of the metal contrast dramatically with the barrenness of the head, an oval of raw wood upon which he has drawn simple shapes in pencil.

In terms of ideas, the head makes perfect sense. “Don’t look in here,” it says, “the space around me is infinitely more interesting.” Teaching by example, it invites viewers to get out of their heads and into their surroundings. This is the world Berlant’s images occupy, a sensuous realm in which nothing means much until it captures your imagination.

“Joshua Tree” ups the ante. Smaller yet more vibrant, its landscape does not ripple outward from a still center. Without a blank spot that allows your eye to rest, its sexy surface moves in every direction simultaneously, seething and heaving like a mind-blowing hallucination.

“Topanga” and “Rio” follow suit, creating verdant and carnival-esque environments in which nothing is explicit but everything is vivid. Accuracy of depiction gives way to intensity of sensation.

“Ornans” is an asymmetrical mandala that recalls Billy Al Bengston’s “dentos,” Edmund Teske’s solarized photographs and Bruce Conner’s collages. In a side gallery, nine intimately scaled works by Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) provide a touching contrast to Berlant’s muscular works, all of which include so many nooks and crannies that it’s easy to get off the beaten path and make your own discoveries.

L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Oct. 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.